Tim Bray on Grokipedia

Wondering if the project will get better from the pushback or will just be folded like one of Elon's many ADHD experiments. In a sense, encyclopedias should be easy for LLMs: they are meant to survey and summarize well-documented material rather than contain novel insights; they are often imprecise and muddled already (look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree and see how many conventions coexist without an explanation of their differences; it used to be worse a few years ago); the writing style is pretty much that of GPT-5. But the problem type of "summarize a biased source and try to remove the bias" isn't among the ones I've seen LLMs being tested for, and this is what Elon's project lives and dies by.

If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their fields and comment on their biases rather than waste their time rewriting the articles from scratch. The results can then be published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up, without needlessly duplicating the 90% of the work that it has been doing well.

> can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up

what if your goal is for wikipedia to be biased in your favor?

> "If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their fields and comment on their biases [...] The results can then be published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up [...]"

One thing I love about the Wikipedias (plural, as they're all different orgs): anyone "in the know" can very quickly tell who's got no practical knowledge of Wikipedia's structure, rules, customs, and practices to begin with. What you're proposing like it's some sort of Big Beautiful Idea has already been done countless times, is being done, and will be done for as long as Wikis exist.

And Groggypedia? It's nothing more but a pathetic vanity project of an equally pathetic manbaby for people who think LLM-slop continously fine-tuned to reflect the bias of their guru, and the tool's owner, is a Seal of Quality.

No no no, you see, you got it all wrong. If the Wikipedia article on, let’s say, transsexualism, says that’s an orientation, not a disease—then that’s leftist bias. Removing that bias means correcting it to say it’s a mental illness, obviously. That makes the article unbiased, pure truth.

Don't forget that public opinion and the media landscape are quite different in 2025 from what they were in the 2010s when most prior studies on WP bias have been written. Sufficiently pertinent (sadly this isn't synonymous with high quality) conservative and anti-woke content can reach wide audiences, particularly when Elon puts his thumb on the scale. Besides, to my knowledge, none of the prior attempts at studying WP bias has even tried to make a big enough fuss to change said bias; the final outcomes of the studies were conference papers.

> "[...] conservative and anti-woke content can reach wide audiences, particularly when Elon puts his thumb on the scale."

No shit; it's always been that way since mass media became a thing. Besides, there is no such thing as quality conservative and/or "anti-woke" media. The very concept represents a contradictio in adiecto. And Elon's just the modern version of an industrialist of yesteryear. Back in the day they owned the mass media of their time: radio and television. Today its "AI"-enshittified parasocial media and ideally the infrastructure that runs those dumps.

> "Don't forget that public opinion and the media landscape are quite different in 2025 from what they were in the 2010s when most prior studies on WP bias have been written."

Bias studies have been written since Wikipedia became a staple in hoi polloi's info diet. And there's always been a whole cottage industry of pathological and practised liars (e. g. the Heritage Foundation, amongst others) catering to right-wing grievance issues. The marked difference is that the right's attacks against Wikipedia as an institution are more aggressive since Trump... completely in line with the more aggressive attacks on human rights, reason, science, and democratic institutions on part of conservatives world wide.

Bray brought up a really good point. The Grokipedia entry on him was several times the length of his Wikipedia entry, not just because Grok's writing style is verbose, but also because it went into exhaustive detail on insignificant parts of his life simply because the sources were online. My own brief browsings of Grokipedia have left me with the same impression. The current iteration of Grokipedia, besides being untrustworthy, wastes a lot of time beating around the bush and, frequently, off into the weeds.

Just as LLM's lack the capacity for basic logic, they also lack the kind of judgment required to pare down a topic to what is of interest to humans. I don't know if this is an insurmountable shortcoming of LLM's, but it certainly seems to be a brick wall for the current bunch.

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The technology to make Grokipedia work isn't there yet. However, my real concern is the problem Grokipedia is intended to solve: Musk wants his own version of Wikipedia, with a political slant of his liking, and without any pesky human authors. He also clearly wants Wikipedia taken down[1]. This is reality control for billionaires.

Perhaps LLM generated encyclopedias could be useful, but what Musk is trying to do makes it absolutely clear that we will need to continue carefully evaluating any sources we use for bias. If Musk wants to reframe the sum of human knowledge because he doesn't like being called out for his sieg heils, only a fool would place any trust in the result.

[1]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon...

>reality control for billionaires

Not to beat a dead horse, but one really could wake up one day and find out we've always been at war with Oceana after the flip of a switch in an LLM encyclopedia.

An encyclopedia article is already an exercise in survey-and-summarize.

Asking an LLM to reprocess it again is only going to add error.

Note that I've said "anti-woke content", not "anti-woke media". I am including the occasional "course correction" opeds and actually well-researched longreads you're seeing in places like NYT, Atlantic and such. Partisan outlets for partisan readers aren't doing the heavy lifting here, but the success of Substack and the unexpected survival of Twitter under Elon have convinced editors to listen. Elon's personality isn't of importance here; he mostly needs to just push a few buttons to make a sub-critical news item go super-critical.

> "Note that I've said 'anti-woke content', not 'anti-woke media'."

In the context of my argument a distinction without difference.

> "I am including the occasional "course correction" opeds and actually well-researched longreads you're seeing in places like NYT, Atlantic and such."

Well, that's the crux: There is no such thing for me as "actually well-researched anti-woke content". That's just a pathetic, and ultimately tragic, hallucination in the same vein as "actually well-researched" pieces of flat earthers, pushing their trash. Et cetera.

> "Elon's personality isn't of importance here [...]"

I can tell you're one of those guys who paid "actually a lot of" attention when The Cult of Personality was negotiated in the classroom.

It only seems to be a problem for bigots like you. Trans folks just want to live their lives. Why can’t you leave them the fuck alone?

It is quite common to freeze sperm before starting HRT or surgeries.

So, are monks and nuns mentally ill?

Any condition that causes men to be so sex-starved, they take it out on kids is maladaptative, and yet it hasn't abated for millenia.

You can’t hold an entire group of people responsible for the actions of a few extremists, unless you want to stop Christians and Muslims as well. And don’t get me started on all the shit men pull off worldwide, yet I don’t see you rallying against heterosexuality?

This is the more extreme end of the scale of a general pattern of harassing women for saying "no". Whether that be "no you're not a woman" or "no you're not a lesbian" or "no you can't come in here it's female-only".

At least most Christians and Muslims accept that others don't believe in their religion and, for the most part, don't force them to act as if they do.

> Any condition which causes the individual to self-sterilize or not have progeny is maladaptive from an evolutionary perspective

I mean, this is just trivially wrong on a basic factual level. Look at ants, look at bees, even some mammals like mole-rats.

Not that these "biological facts" argument ever hold any water for complex social issues, but would you mind at least using actual facts?

> But the problem type of "summarize a biased source and try to remove the bias" isn't among the ones I've seen LLMs being tested for, and this is what Elon's project lives and dies by.

And if you believe that you’ll believe anything. “Try to _change_ the bias” would be closer.

> At least most Christians and Muslims accept that others don't believe in their religion and, for the most part, don't force them to act as if they do.

I've actually found Christians in America quite to be forcing their beliefs quite loudly upon everyone. Pretty wild to be personally offended by the tiny fraction of a percent that is the trans population (of which an even tinier amount is vocal as you say they are).

That's not why you are obsessed with trans people. You are terrified that the next woman you ogle covetously or catcall won't have the parts you expect.

You don't care about protecting women. The only thing you care about is protecting your fragile sense of masculinity.

But you acknowledge that it is overbearing and undesirable for them to force their beliefs, and if someone called you "bigot" for complaining about this you would probably object, right?

That is a super odd comment and I have no idea why you believe this. Projecting, perhaps?

> I have no idea why you believe this.

Because I have thought about why people choose to hyper-focus on trans-folk, and it's one of the few explanations that makes sense, at least for men.

Why would someone say that they're "protecting" women, but advocate against abortion rights, divorce, sufferage, or higher limits on the age of consent to marry?

Why would someone say their religious views are incompatible, but have switched sects twice in the past decade because they disagreed with the direction their previous church was going in?

Why would someone claim to be protecting children from indoctrination yet vote for indoctrination of their own political views?

The contradictory explanations never made sense to me. The self-interested ones do.

Well, given that your comment was targeted to me personally and not to the caricature you're describing, I can tell you that every single one of your unfounded assumptions are incorrect.

Look for anything written by Jesse Singal or Charles Murray for the well-researched anti-woke content I'm referring to (and there is a lot of more; these are just two authors who made it their focus; some of the best stuff comes actually comes from journalists with wider purviews).

I don't know what "Cult of Personality" you are referring to; unless you are hallucinating this particular reference, I've gone to school in the wrong country for that particular report to be part of my assigned reading (and the right country, sadly, seems to have skipped it entirely; there might be an update out in a few years...). Either way, what is the relevance here? What I've been saying is that I'm far from sure of this project's success and would be doing it quite differently. Musk's personal characteristics may well be the reason why he did it the way he did, but ultimately the project won't live and die by them (already because he himself will likely lose interest soon enough).

Indeed, I did not itemize out every possible rationalization I have seen. The exact shape of the rationalization isn't terribly interesting or germane.

It's the underlying insecurities that those forms of motivated reasoning are covering up for that is far more illustrative.

> "Look for anything written by Jesse Singal or Charles Murray for the well-researched anti-woke content I'm referring to [...]"

Plonk

> At least most Christians and Muslims accept that others don't believe in their religion and, for the most part, don't force them to act as if they do.

Just like most trans people accept that others don’t understand their way of life, and, for the most part, don’t force them to act as if they do.

Yet you can’t acknowledge that and pretend all trans people are some kind of opaque mob.

So are you saying that most will have no problem at all with this, for example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgq9ejql39t

That’s just moving the goalposts. Are you trying to say that in your opinion, trans people should be okay with that?

Tell me again please how someone feeling they have a different sexual identity from their biological body—and acting upon that with a medical procedure—negatively affects others? This isn't a "belief" thing, but a fundamental hurt they carry with them every single day, a profound feeling of wrongness. How on earth could it trouble you, a—supposedly—straight male, that someone doesn't want to feel that way? What do they take away from you? Why do these people need to be suppressed and drowned out as much as possible?

It is about beliefs. If they want to pretend they are the opposite sex, to the point where they end up believing they are, they can do so. If they want to take medication in an attempt to imitate some opposite sex characteristics, because they believe it turns them into the sex they desire to be, they can do that too. Not a problem.

However, if they want to use services and spaces intended only for the opposite sex, that is a problem, and it is where the conflict lies. For women and girls in particular, this takes away their dignity and safety, if any man who says he's a woman gets to use women's spaces.

That's what the men who smashed up that feminist conference (as described in the news article I linked above) were protesting. Women saying no to them on this.

I'm not straight by the way but it wouldn't matter if I was. Not sure why you made that false assumption or thought it relevant.